Aurelia Butler

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    Just Like a Woman: Female Artists Cover Bob Dylan

    Hear versions by Marianne Faithfull, Joan Baez, Nina Simone and more.Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in 1963.Rowland Scherman/Getty ImagesDear listeners,In 2016, when Bob Dylan became the first singer-songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, The Guardian asked six female artists to talk about his work. With his wild, Einsteinian coif, Romantic poet adoration and cryptic, sometimes ornery nature, Dylan is often held up as an emblematic example of the modern male genius. We’ve heard plenty about him from men over the years; refreshingly, The Guardian let some brilliant and fascinating women have their turn. “My mother always thought that Dylan was somewhat misogynistic,” the singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega said, “but I don’t see that. I see a whole range of female characters in his music from goddesses and queens and women revered and then also women used, abused.”When adding footnotes to the republished version of an incisive 1967 essay she’d written about Dylan, the great cultural critic Ellen Willis came to a slightly different conclusion. “Here and elsewhere in this prefeminist essay I refer with aplomb if not outright endorsement to Dylan’s characteristic bohemian contempt for women (which he combined with an equally obnoxious idealization of female goddess figures),” she wrote, adding that she’d since come to view these tendencies more critically. Still, these observations didn’t dilute her appreciation of Dylan’s work, nor the rigorous scrutiny she brought to it throughout her life. She was simply asserting something that has often become lost in more recent times — that “talking back” to a piece of art isn’t the same as dismissing it. It is much more often a way of keeping it alive.For today’s playlist, I wanted to put together a kind of musical version of that Guardian piece: a collection of Dylan songs interpreted by women. It’s not meant to be comprehensive; while putting it together I was reminded that there are a lot of great Dylan covers by female musicians, so apologies if your favorite didn’t make the list. (Though feel free to let me know.)As Willis put it, memorably, at the end of that previously mentioned essay, “In a communication crisis, the true prophets are the translators.” She was talking about Dylan, of course. But I think of the following artists — like Marianne Faithfull, Joan Baez and Nina Simone — as translators in their own right, too.Listen along on Spotify as you read.1. Cher: “All I Really Want to Do” (1965)Cher’s debut single, produced by her then husband Sonny Bono, was this jangly cover of the opening track on “Another Side of Bob Dylan” — a kind of one-person duet between the masculine and feminine ends of Cher’s vocal range. As she writes in her highly entertaining 1998 biography “The First Time,” “No one believed it was just me, because I did both the high part and the low part at the beginning of each verse.” She also recounts, later in that chapter, how she ran into Dylan in a New York recording studio as her version was climbing the charts. He told her that he dug what she’d done with it, which, Cher writes, “made me feel like floating away.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Joan Baez: “Simple Twist of Fate” (1975)By the time she released her 1975 album “Diamonds and Rust,” Baez had been recording gorgeous, reverent covers of material written by Dylan — her folk musical peer, collaborator and former flame — for more than a decade. Her rollicking cover of “Simple Twist of Fate” is something else, though: playful, self-assured and even a little sassy, especially when she uses a laughably nasal Dylan impression in the second half of the song. Writing the haunting title track off “Diamonds and Rust,” a poetic remembrance of her ’60s romance with Dylan, must have freed her up to have some fun with his material. (Listen on YouTube)3. Marianne Faithfull: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (1971)In 1965, shortly after the release of her debut single “As Tears Go By,” Faithfull spent some time hanging in the Savoy with Dylan and his entourage, while D.A. Pennebaker was filming “Don’t Look Back.” At one point, Dylan played Faithfull his latest album: “Bringing It All Back Home.” Six years later, when her voice had begun maturing beyond light pop fare and into that seen-it-all croak, Faithfull recorded her own version of the album’s final track, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” She’d revisit the song again many years later, too, on her 2018 album “Negative Capability.” (Listen on YouTube)4. Nico: “I’ll Keep It With Mine” (1967)It’s a rare experience, getting to hear a song’s muse sing and interpret material that was written about her. (Allegedly, as we must add with any speculation of what or who a Dylan song is “about.”) But such is the poignancy and power of Nico’s rendition of “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” which she recorded for her 1967 debut solo album, “Chelsea Girl.” Dylan wrote the song while traveling around Europe with a pre-Velvet Underground Nico during their brief 1964 romance, and though he attempted to record it for “Bringing It All Back Home” and, later, “Blonde on Blonde,” he ended up saving it for release on his bootleg collection. Nico’s version, then, is probably the best known: The signature, heavy-cream richness of her voice makes it sound impossibly melancholy, but there’s a buoyancy to her cadences that conveys the sweetness and devotion to companionship at the heart of the song. (Listen on YouTube)5. Bettye LaVette: “Ain’t Talkin’” (2018)I discovered this smoldering cover just a few months ago, after reading about it in Greil Marcus’s great 2022 book “Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs.” (Always read Greil Marcus on Bob Dylan.) One of those seven songs is the creepily somnambulant “Ain’t Talkin’,” from Dylan’s 2006 album “Modern Times,” though Marcus rightly praises this reworking by the beloved soul singer Bettye LaVette for enlivening the composition with her unique sensibility. He quotes LaVette, speaking of this and a few other Dylan covers on her 2018 album “Things Have Changed”: “I wasn’t going to tributize him.” Instead she was looking to make the songs “fit into my mouth,” as she put it, “just as if they’d been written for me.” Mission accomplished. (Listen on YouTube)6. Mavis Staples: “Gotta Serve Somebody” (1999)The story goes that Dylan — a huge fan of the Staples Singers — proposed marriage to a young Mavis Staples when his career was just getting off the ground; she turned him down because she wasn’t yet ready to settle down. (She told The Guardian in 2016, “I often think what would have happened if I’d married Dylan.”) Musically, though, the two linked up throughout their lives: Staples joined Dylan for a 2003 duet of his 1979 gospel song “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking,” and in recent years they’ve toured together repeatedly. Staples’s blazing solo version of “Gotta Serve Somebody,” from a 1999 Dylan tribute, revels in the gritty rasp and bottomless depths of her one-of-a-kind voice. (Listen on YouTube)7. Marianne Faithfull: “Visions of Johanna” (1971)I simply could not choose just one Marianne Faithfull cover! And then I realized I didn’t have to! (Listen on YouTube)8. Emmylou Harris: “Every Grain of Sand” (1995)Emmylou Harris’s voice strains and nearly cracks open with exalted feeling on her passionately sung cover of “Every Grain of Sand,” a standout from Dylan’s spiritually minded 1981 album “Shot of Love.” It’s a welcome spotlight on a less appreciated stretch of Dylan’s songwriting. (Listen on YouTube)9. PJ Harvey: “Highway 61 Revisited” (1993)PJ Harvey dredges up the darkness in “Highway 61” with this wild version that appeared on her landmark 1993 album “Rid of Me.” Gone is the whimsical slide whistle; taking its place is Harvey’s torrential storms of guitar distortion and menacingly whispered vocals, making Dylan’s cheeky biblical sendup sound more like a nightmare. (Albeit a very cool one.) (Listen on YouTube)10. Nina Simone: “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (1969)On her 1969 album “To Love Somebody,” Nina Simone completely reimagines “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” in both arrangement and tone. The version Dylan made famous on “Highway 61 Revisited” is charmingly cluttered, chock-full of layered instrumentation and reference-stuffed lines. But Simone clears almost everything out, building something extraordinary out of little more than quietly played piano, hand drums and that magnificently weary voice, turning Dylan’s surrealist fresco into a deeply felt hymn to the down-and-out. (Listen on YouTube)I’m going back to New York City, I do believe I’ve had enough,LindsayThe Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“Just Like a Woman: Female Artists Cover Dylan” track listTrack 1: Cher, “All I Really Want to Do”Track 2: Joan Baez, “Simple Twist of Fate”Track 3: Marianne Faithfull, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”Track 4: Nico, “I’ll Keep It With Mine”Track 5: Bettye LaVette, “Ain’t Talkin’”Track 6: Mavis Staples, “Gotta Serve Somebody”Track 7: Marianne Faithfull, “Visions of Johanna”Track 8: Emmylou Harris, “Every Grain of Sand”Track 9: PJ Harvey, “Highway 61 Revisited”Track 10: Nina Simone, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”Bonus tracksTina Turner’s cover of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” is — alas! — missing from most streaming services, but if you dig around I bet you can find it on YouTube. Ahem.Also, on this week’s Playlist, Taylor Swift rewrites her back pages, plus new songs from First Aid Kit, Anohni and the Johnsons and more. More

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    Patrick Wilson on ‘Insidious: The Red Door’ and ‘The Conjuring’

    When Patrick Wilson was first approached about reprising the role of Josh Lambert — the patriarch of a family terrorized by ghouls in James Wan’s haunted-house chiller, “Insidious” (2010) — he was unenthusiastic.“Another sequel? I thought, ‘Oh boy, what new ground is there to even cover?’ I’m good. I’ve got my other horror franchise,” Wilson said.The “other” franchise refers to “The Conjuring,” also conceived by Wan, which began as a 2013 paranormal horror tale that led to a separate universe of sequels and prequels in which Wilson plays one half of a team of married demonologists. Between “The Conjuring” and the first two “Insidious” movies, Wilson has established himself as a bona fide scream king. Still, he’s a classically trained actor who has starred in big-budget superhero movies (“Watchmen,” “Aquaman”), indie dramas (“Little Children”) and musical theater productions (“Oklahoma!”). The prospect of a new “Insidious” didn’t seem all that exciting.Then, Wilson was asked if he’d consider directing it, too. That got his attention.Wilson on set with Ty Simpkins, who plays his son in “Insidious: The Red Door.” The two also worked together on “Little Children.”Boris Martin/Screen Gems and SonyWilson starring in the latest “Insidious.” He initially wasn’t interested in the sequel, especially because he also has the “Conjuring” franchise.Nicole Rivelli/Screen Gems/Sony“I’d been trying to direct a movie since 2015,” Wilson told me over coffee at a West Village bistro. “TV didn’t appeal to me. And I’m not the kind of guy who wants to make a tiny indie that nobody sees just to prove that I can do it. I want my movie to play well in theaters, so to have this half-a-billion-dollar franchise supported by a studio come my way — that’s rare for a first-time director.”“Insidious: The Red Door,” the fifth movie to fly under the “Insidious” banner, wisely skips over the lackluster third and fourth installments and returns to the events of “Insidious: Chapter 2” (2013). After nearly ax-murdering his entire family, Jack Torrance-style, Josh retakes control of his body from a psycho-biddy demon, and — with the help of a mind-scrubbing hypnotist — completely represses all memory of his possession. The Lamberts are free and the credits roll.“No offense, but that’s not how you deal with a problem,” Wilson chuckled.“The Red Door” confronts the trauma of that earlier film from the perspective of a father-son relationship. Ten years later, Josh has separated from his wife, Renai (Rose Byrne), and is the quintessential absent dad, haunted by a past he can’t articulate. In “Insidious,” it’s revealed that the couple’s eldest child, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), has inherited his father’s ability to astral project, which renders him vulnerable to the ghosts hanging out in a netherworld called the Further. Dalton, too, had his memory erased. Now, the prickly teenager rejects his father, though he’s stuck with him on the drive to his first year of art school.I asked Wilson if his sons — one is heading to college soon — send him curt one-word texts. “Nah, we have a great relationship,” said Wilson, who since 2005 has been married to the actress Dagmara Dominczyk (Karolina in “Succession”).“I’m not the kind of guy who wants to make a tiny indie that nobody sees just to prove that I can do it,” Wilson said of directing. “I want my movie to play well in theaters.”Victor Llorente for The New York TimesWilson accepted the offer to direct “The Red Door” under the condition that it would “make sense with my life.” In practical terms, this meant shooting near his home in Montclair, N.J. (“It was almost like a regular job, coming back to the family after work,” he said.) But he was also keen for his debut to reflect him as a person.Before shooting the Roland Emmerich disaster flick “Moonfall” (2022) and the forthcoming “Aquaman” sequel, Wilson sat down with the screenwriter Scott Teems (“Halloween Kills”) and, essentially, bared his soul. Teems took these raw materials and shaped them into a story about inherited trauma and artistic vulnerability — with jump scares and creepy-crawlies, of course.The film marks a return to form for the “Insidious” franchise, recapturing the original’s pretentiousless thrills and fun-house charms, approaching the Lamberts’ grim history with the silliness and sincerity of throwback horror from the ’80s or ’90s.“The best kind of horror movie makes you feel unsafe,” Michael Koresky, the co-founder of the Museum of Moving Image’s house publication, Reverse Shot, wrote in an email. Koresky is a fan of the “Insidious” movies, explaining that watching the original was like “a breath of fresh air amid the fetid field of reactionary early-21st-century horror, which had become reliant on gruesome torture. Every time a face appeared after a shock cut, I remember feeling played like a piano — thrillingly so.”Wilson wasn’t an especially big fan of the genre when he first signed on to “Insidious.” He considers himself a generalist. “I grew up with Indiana Jones and ‘Star Wars,’” said Wilson, who just turned 50, adding that his taste in film was shaped by outings to the multiplexes around Tampa Bay, Fla., where he was raised with his two older brothers.“I was into horror movies that transcended genre — ‘Salem’s Lot,’ ‘Jaws.’” His eyes widened: “‘Poltergeist.’ I remember when I was a kid, our house was robbed. Absolutely no connection to the ‘Poltergeist,’ but the way my brain processed that event, the terror I felt when we got home and realized our house had been invaded, my memory embedded the two things together.”For “The Red Door,” Wilson knew he wanted Dalton to be an artist, invoking the horror archetype of the gloomy kid drawing morbid images in crayon — only Dalton, at 18, has decided to make a career out of it. “Going to any kind of arts school is spiritually taxing,” Wilson said, recalling his years in Carnegie Mellon University’s acting conservatory. Under the tutelage of a demanding professor (Hiam Abbass from “Succession”), Dalton is encouraged to dig into his inner life to fuel his work, which teases the Further’s fiends out of hiding.Wilson routinely travels to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh to lead acting workshops. “I’ve always been comfortable with instructing others,” he said, explaining that he may not be a “film school guy” but he does know a thing or two about how the camera creates images.Wilson is a classically trained performer who leads acting workshops at his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. Victor Llorente for The New York Times“I’m always conscious of my relationship to the camera when I act — what is the lens size? How is it moving? I made my actors watch themselves because what you feel and what the audience sees can be different things.”Josh, terrified that he’s perpetuating the mistakes of his own father, tries desperately to find the cause for his instability. In one eerie sequence, he gets an M.R.I. When he’s in the machine, the lights cut off, and the camera approximates the patient’s woozy point of view — total vulnerability, meaning something’s just around the corner.Set primarily on a college campus, the film also pokes fun at the fragility of men who try incredibly hard to seem, well, masculine — like the toxic fraternity brothers floating in Dalton’s orbit. Wilson’s own statuesque appearance — I told him I still think of him as the “prom king,” the name given to him by the lusty neighborhood mothers in “Little Children” — might seem to group him with this lot. With “The Red Door,” Wilson made a point to engage with the cultural conversation about masculinity. Being a father to two sons means he’s constantly thinking about what it means to promote a healthy identity for young men.“Men have a hard time sharing how they feel, me included,” Ty Simpkins wrote in an email. He and Wilson have something of a longstanding father-son bond: Simpkins’s first role was as the prom king’s jester-hat-wearing toddler in “Little Children,” and Wilson “even shared a beer with me on my 21st birthday,” Simpkins added.Wilson perked up when I asked him about his love of rock music, another personal touch he weaves into his directing debut. Listen closely and you’ll hear him singing over the end credits to the heavy-metal stylings of the Swedish band Ghost. Wilson seemed giddy to join the small ranks of directors who sing songs in their own movies. He cited John Carpenter and “Big Trouble in Little China” as an inspiration.When Mike Nichols cast him in “Angels in America,” Wilson said the director talked to him about Paul Newman’s career. “Being a movie star is hard, he told me. You go where it takes you. To enjoy doing one of the opportunities given to you — that’s a privilege.” More

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    ‘Insidious: The Red Door’ Review: The Ghost of Jump Scares Past

    Patrick Wilson makes his directorial debut with this fifth installment of the horror franchise haunted by a red-faced demon.“Insidious,” whose fifth installment opened Friday, is a second-tier horror franchise — it’s not even the best James Wan franchise starring Patrick Wilson, which would be “The Conjuring” — with a few elite jump scares, including one of the best in the genre. In the original in 2010, Lorraine Lambert (Barbara Hershey) is telling her son, Josh (Wilson), about a horrible dream when a red-faced demon suddenly appears behind his head. It’s a magnificent shock because of the askew blocking, the patient misdirection of the editing and Hershey’s committed performance.In “Insidious: The Red Door,” a grim, workmanlike effort that collapses into woo-woo nonsense, Wilson makes his directorial debut, and demonstrates he grasps the importance of that jump scare, which is sketched in charcoal on paper next to his name in the opening credits. But that reference is also a reminder of what’s missing.The movie begins nine years after the second “Insidious” at the funeral of Lorraine, and its first scare, a nicely oblique if relatively simple one, once again takes place above her son’s head. Josh’s memory has been scrubbed in the previous film but nags at him, and Wilson doesn’t move the camera from his own face inside a car as he goes through an array of emotions while texting his son Dalton (Ty Simpkins). This prickly relationship is at the center of the movie, as dad drives his son to college. They share the family curse, a habit of being visited by evil figures from another realm called the Further (think the Upside Down from “Stranger Things”).As has become cliché, trauma takes center stage, with characters mouthing lines like, “We need to remember even the things that hurt” — which is at least better than pretentious small talk like “Death floods the mind with memory.”The leaden screenplay would be easier to overlook if there were more spooky sequences. Wilson stages one nicely claustrophobic scene inside an M.R.I. machine, but his peekaboo shocks can be a little telegraphed. And while his placid, android handsomeness can hint at the uncanny, making him a magnetic horror actor, there are fewer standout performances than in previous installments of the series, which has been notable for turns by Rose Byrne and Lin Shaye (both of whom show up again, too briefly). “The Red Door” loses energy when it focuses on Simpkins’s Dalton, a blandly brooding artist type who cries while painting, and the grim doings in the Further, whose aesthetic evokes a homemade haunted house in the family garage.“Insidious” is essentially a ghost story, so ending it presents a typical challenge. Unlike with vampires and serial killers, it’s not clear how the apparition threatens to end the chase. The abrupt resolution of this chapter is a letdown, but not as much of one as the return of the red-faced demon, who pops up, unobscured, center frame. The result is not a jump scare so much as a bunny hop.Insidious: The Red DoorRated PG-13 for explicit violins and implicit violence. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Germany Celebrates Wolf Biermann, a Singer Who United East and West

    A show at the German Historical Museum honors Wolf Biermann, whose music and moral stance endeared him to audiences across the once divided country.If passers-by on a busy bridge in central Berlin on a recent summer afternoon recognized East Germany’s most famous songwriter, poet and dissident, they did not show it.Posing for this article’s photographs in front of a huge wrought iron eagle that featured on one of his best known record sleeves, Wolf Biermann, 86, smiled and tried joking with the afternoon crowd. But the office workers and tourists ignored him and continued their journeys across the river.Nearly five decades after Biermann was thrown out of East Germany for criticizing its totalitarian Communist government, the German Historical Museum is honoring him with a major exhibition. Biermann may not be recognized on the street, but the show, which opens Friday and runs through Jan. 14, 2024, proves he is far from forgotten: He is the first living person in recent memory to be the subject of such an exhibition at Germany’s national history museum.In a life that crisscrossed the East-West border that once divided Germany, Biermann’s music and principled moral stance made him a rare figure who transcended that barrier. Now, his tale is a perfect one for the united Germany to celebrate.“His story is both East German and West German history,” said Monika Boll, the exhibition’s curator. “You can’t get more German than that.”Biermann was born under Nazism, in 1936, and raised in West Germany. As a teenager, he defected to the East and made a career as a singer of witty, folk-inspired songs — until an anti-authoritarian streak in his music began to trouble the Communist authorities. For a decade from the mid-60s, Biermann’s songs, many of which he recorded in his East Berlin apartment, were smuggled to the West and released by record labels there, then smuggled back behind the iron curtain.After a 1976 concert in Cologne, West Germany, in which he criticized the government of East Germany, Biermann was barred from re-entering that country, where he had made his home.Barbara Klemm/Frankfurter Allgemeine ZeitungYet Biermann wanted to stay in the German Democratic Republic, or G.D.R. Although he was the subject of a yearslong state surveillance operation, he was never imprisoned, unlike many other critics of the government. The authorities worried about a backlash from West Germany, where the press was taking special note of Biermann’s career.In a speech at the exhibition opening on Wednesday, Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture minister, compared Biermann to a “raised middle finger” aimed at the “pride of the G.D.R. leadership.” The opening’s guests included many former East German dissidents, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s former chancellor.In an interview, Biermann said that his life story was instructive for anyone who wants to understand Germany’s complicated postwar past. “I’m the ideal counterpoint,” Bierman said, to what was typical in those decades. “To recognize what was normal, you need to look at the exception,” he added.Right from his childhood, he did the opposite of everyone around him, he added. His family was staunchly communist, he recalled, and his father was Jewish. Naturally, he said, they detested the Nazis — unlike most German families at the time.Even the British fire bombing of his hometown, Hamburg, which he only survived by diving into a canal with his mother, did not stop Biermann rooting for the Allies. In a song, he later wrote:And because I was born under the yellow starIn GermanyThat is why we took the English bombsLike gifts from heaven.His father, Dagobert Biermann, a labor organizer, was murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis when Biermann was 6.In 1953, swimming against the historical tide, the 16-year-old Biermann moved, alone, from West Germany to the East, just as thousands were fleeing in the other direction in search of a better life. But as a convinced Communist, Biermann thought it was the G.D.R., not the capitalist West, that offered a more just and moral vision.Right from his childhood, Biermann said, he did the opposite of everyone around him.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesA talent for music was recognized during his tenure as a production assistant at Berthold Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble theater, where he had been hired by Brecht’s widow. Supported by politically connected sponsors, Biermann had gained minor notice as a singer-songwriter by 1960. If his lyrics offended some, he got away with it because of his communist bone fides, including the fact that his father was killed by fascists.But soon his lyrics and texts became too critical of the government and, in 1965, the authorities — which had tight control over cultural life — de facto banned Biermann from performing, recording or publishing in East Germany.During the 11 years in which he was also not allowed to leave the country, Biermann’s apartment became his stage and recording studio, and he was under constant watch. Over the decades, the East German state security services, known as the Stasi, watched and bugged his home, followed his car, listened to his phone calls and tried to recruit his friends and lovers.“You could say he was in the champion league — such a level of surveillance was atypical,” said Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian who has studied Biermann’s Stasi file.Biermann responded ironically with “The Ballad of the Stasi,” in which he commiserates with the poor “Stasi dogs” monitoring him, who would probably end up singing his songs in bed.East German fans who were caught with Biermann’s music on bootleg cassette tapes or handbills of his verse could be arrested and locked away for years. But his apartment, which was close to the main border crossing point into West Berlin, still became a gathering place for dissident artists and thinkers. American stars, like Joan Baez and Allen Ginsburg, also visited him there.A turning point in Biermann’s career came in 1976, with a three-and-half-hour concert he gave to a sold-out hall in Cologne, on a rare visit to West Germany. He came out swinging against the “old comrades” who ran East Germany, and painted a bleak picture of life behind the wall. Three days later, while watching the news on television, he learned that he had been permanently barred from re-entry to East Germany.Demonstrators in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall Fell. The placard, in German, reads, “We want our old singer Biermann back!”Archiv Wolf Biermann; Staatsbibliothek–PK/Abteilung Handschriften und historische Drucke Biermann said he was crestfallen to be shut out of the country he held so dear, despite all its shortcomings. While hundreds of people were risking their lives crossing illegally to the West, Biermann’s heart pined for the East. “With me, everything was always the other way around — that’s almost the fundamental law,” he said.Biermann’s expulsion led to protests by East Germany’s most famous artists, writers and actors, and the government reacted with further repressions on artistic expression that remained in place until the fall of the Berlin Wall, 13 years later.After Germany’s 1990 reunification — in which he played an important role — Biermann remained active, though less in the spotlight. He continued to be a respected figure on the German left, even as he voiced unpopular opinions among his comrades: He supported the American-led war in Iraq, and criticized the peace movement that grew against it.Standing in front of the bridge’s wrought iron eagle in Berlin, Biermann recalled writing one of his most popular songs, “The Ballad of the Prussian Icarus,” after he and Ginsburg crossed the bridge in 1976 and took pictures in front of the bird. They made a bet over which of them would bring the iron creature into verse, Biermann recalled.That song, which became one of his best known, is typical Biermann, a lyrical critique of the East German state that notes:The barbed wire slowly grows deepInto the skin, the chest and boneInto the brain’s gray cellsAs tourist boats passed under its perch on the bridge, the same eagle looked out on a very different world. If Biermann now has an official place in German history, it’s because of the part he played in shaping it.Wolf Biermann: A Poet and Songwriter From GermanyThrough Jan. 14, 2024, at the German Historical Museum, in Berlin; dhm.de. More

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    Taylor Swift Revises a Lyric on ‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’

    Hear tracks by Prince, Rauw Alejandro, First Aid Kit and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Taylor Swift, ‘Better Than Revenge (Taylor’s Version)’“Speak Now,” from 2010, was Taylor Swift’s third album, and it is now the third to be rereleased as a rerecorded “Taylor’s Version.” But all along, the album was a declaration of independence: It was the first she wrote entirely on her own, as a rebuttal to critics — perhaps like the one she cuts down on the sugary, spicy “Mean” — who suggested that Swift’s co-writers had a bigger hand in her previous successes than she’d let on. “Speak Now” remains one of Swift’s best and most sharply penned albums: The line “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter,” from the chorus of the great opening track “Mine,” is often held up as an example of Swift’s lyricism at its most expertly concise.But “Speak Now” is an album of excesses, too; some of them are glorious — like the epic kiss-off “Dear John” or the romantic grandiosity of “Enchanted” — and some of them are the authentic artifacts of a 19-year-old’s somewhat myopic sensibility. “Mean,” which punches down, is guilty of that, and so is the acidic rocker “Better Than Revenge,” which has the most significantly revised lyrics in a “Taylor’s Version.” “He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches,” Swift sings on this 2023 update, a clumsier and less direct lyric than the original: “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.” The change is unfortunate, and perhaps the beginning of a slippery slope of self-editing. The previous lyric was sanctimonious and nasty, yes, but it was also a historical document of Swift’s point of view at 19, and that of many young women who, being raised in a misogynistic society, are taught to blame the other girl before they learn how to curse “the patriarchy.” LINDSAY ZOLADZFirst Aid Kit, ‘Everybody’s Got to Learn’First Aid Kit is a duo of Swedish sisters, Johanna and Klara Söderberg, whose vocal harmonies are so perfect they can seem unreal. They have thoroughly studied 1970s Laurel Canyon folk-pop, with its gleaming, precisely blended electric and acoustic guitars. “Everybody’s Got to Learn,” from the expanded version of the 2022 album “Palomino,” sounds like parental advice from Fleetwood Mac. Over earnest folk-rock guitars and what grows into a hefty girl-group beat, the song reflects on the missteps that lead to maturity — “The blues and the bliss/you’ll hit and you’ll miss” — and promises, “You’re gonna see this through.” JON PARELESPrince, ‘All a Share Together Now’The latest find from Prince’s vault is “All a Share Together Now,” a song he recorded in 2006 but never released in any form. Prince sings about generational responsibilities — “the debt of the ones before us must be paid” — in a taut, bare-bones funk workout built around a jumpy bass riff. Live drums kick the beat around and a note-bending guitar teases out terse licks that are simultaneously lead and rhythm. It’s a homily disguised as a jam. PARELESRauw Alejandro, ‘Cuando Baje el Sol’Rauw Alejandro’s new album, “Playa Saturno,” eases back on the electronic experiments of his 2022 album, “Saturno,” in favor of earthy, party-ready reggaeton. But in “Cuando Baje el Sol” (“When the Sun Goes Down”), Alejandro and his fellow producers complicate the reggaeton thump with plenty of spatial and sonic mischief. Sampled and warped vocals, echoey synthesizers, turntable scratching and eruptive percussion all ricochet around his promises of hot times after sunset. PARELESKaisa’s Machine, ‘Gravity’Is “Taking Shape” — the latest album by the bassist Kaisa Mäensivu and her quintet, Kaisa’s Machine — a journal, or a workbook? Original tunes like “Shadow Mind” (a listless ballad) and “Eat Dessert First” (the LP’s eager, clattery final track) bespeak a confessional urge, but they can’t help spotlighting Mäensivu’s conservatory chops and wily compositional tactics. When wizardry takes the wheel — especially in jazz, and especially today — the voice underneath it can end up muffled in the trunk. Mäensivu deserves credit for seeking a healthy balance. “Gravity” is the album’s only track without a piano, slimming down this band of young aces to just bass, drums, guitar and vibraphone. Moving at a fast, nine-beat clip, Mäensivu’s bass line squares up firmly in a minor key, easing you into a space of feeling before the tune’s harmonic center starts shifting around. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOAnohni and the Johnsons, ‘Why Am I Alive Now?’The title is a plain-spoken survivor’s lament, ostensibly about living through a time of environmental collapse: “I don’t want to be witness,” Anohni wails, “seeing all of this duress, aching of our world.” But within the context of Anohni and the Johnsons’ piercing new album “My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross” — which features a photo of the band’s namesake, the gay activist Marsha P. Johnson, on its cover — that question is also haunted by the ghosts of the queer community. By the end of this loose, mournful soul song, Anohni finds a hopeful answer to that titular inquiry: She’s here to tell these stories, to draw attention to these causes, to sing this song. ZOLADZLittle Dragon featuring Damon Albarn, ‘Glow’Surrounded by swirling, twinkling, glimmering arpeggios, Little Dragon’s Yuki Nagano sings about sheer rapture: “Glowing in the dark to find streams of stars to taste.” Midway through, and inexplicably, Damon Albarn arrives from a different, bummed-out dimension, with apologies for being “Under the spell of the eyes that paralyze.” Having provided a little ballast, he vanishes in a download spiral and Nagano returns, still glowing and utterly unperturbed. PARELESFito Páez featuring Mon Laferte, ‘Sasha, Sissi y el Círculo de Baba’Fito Páez, Argentina’s most celebrated — and perpetually eccentric — rocker, decided to remake all the songs on his definitive 1992 album, “El Amor Después el Amor” (“Love After Love”), three decades later for the album “EADDA9223,” joined by duet partners including Elvis Costello, Nathy Peluso and Marisa Monte. “Sasha, Sissi y el Círculo de Baba” — a tale of passion and crime — used busy disco-funk guitar back in 1992. But the new version — trading vocals with the dynamic, torchy Chilean belter Mon Laferte — uncovers the retro bolero underlying the song. With reverb-laden guitar and a trumpet obbligato, Páez and Laferte revel in the drama together. PARELESTkay Maidza & Flume, ‘Silent Assassin’The Australian electronic music producer Flume usually juxtaposes bouncy, consonant chords with a little noise. But the track he brought to the Australian rapper Tkay Maidza is pure irritation: buzzes, distortion, wavery tones, a drone that bristles with dissonance. Maidza tops it with a speedy, shifty, percussive boast, racing through lines like “I’m a jigsaw, not a quick fix” and “I’m tactical, no attachments/I’m doing it for the passion.” From any angle, it’s combative. PARELESPJ Harvey, ‘Lwonesome Tonight’Polly Jean Harvey meticulously constructed a narrative, a sound and a language — based on the local dialect in Dorset, where she grew up — for “I Inside the Old World Dying,” her first album since 2016. The music is folky but fringed with electronics; her vocals are high and eerie, nearly disembodied. In “Lwonesome Tonight,” she sings about encountering a mystically charismatic figure: “Are you Elvis? Are you God?/Jesus sent you, win my trust,” she sings, and at the end she’s left wondering: “My love, will you come back again?” PARELESBrian Blade & the Fellowship Band, ‘God Be With You’Over the past quarter-century, Brian Blade’s Fellowship has come to feel more like a brotherhood than an ensemble, accruing a repertoire of original music that will stand the test of time along with an unmistakable sound: a mix of country, jazz and gospel that exudes a feeling of choral warmth, despite not using any vocals. But beyond that, they’ve stood up against (and basically outlived) a few insidious trends in jazz: When so many fine improvisers seemed be reconciling themselves to a future where the audience might become an afterthought, Blade and Fellowship had no time for that. The group’s fifth album, “Kings Highway,” begins with “Until We Meet Again,” a slowly seductive Blade original that makes reference to a William G. Tomer hymn; it ends with “God Be With You,” a short and elegant rendition of the Tomer piece itself. We can only hope that those valedictory titles aren’t telling us something about Fellowship’s future. RUSSONELLO More

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    How ‘Barbie’ and Blackpink Entered South China Sea Map Spat

    Vietnam banned the film over its apparent use of a Chinese map showing disputed territory. Blackpink concerts may be next. Here’s what the fuss is about.Of all the things that could inflame tensions in a region that could someday be a theater of war between superpowers, the movie “Barbie” was not an obvious catalyst. Yet here we are.The authorities in Vietnam this week banned the upcoming Greta Gerwig film over a map in “Barbie” that they said shows a Chinese map of territory in the South China Sea, where the two neighbors have competing claims.The Philippines, another Southeast Asian country that disputes China’s territorial claims in the sea, is now deciding whether to ban the star-studded film as well. And Vietnam said on Thursday that it was investigating a South China Sea map on the website of a company promoting Blackpink, a K-pop band scheduled to perform in Hanoi this month.Taking such stands against seemingly innocuous cultural exports may look to some like an overreaction. But Vietnam’s responses make more sense if they are viewed within historical and political contexts. Here’s a primer.What is Vietnam’s beef with ‘Barbie’?The head of the Vietnam Cinema Department, an agency in the one-party state, said on Monday that the Warner Bros. film would not be released domestically because of a scene that includes the so-called nine-dash line — a map that appears on official Chinese documents and encircles most of the South China Sea.The official, Vi Kien Thanh, did not say which scene Vietnam hadn’t liked. Several commentators wondered if he meant the one showing Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, standing in front of a crudely drawn world map. Some also noted that the nine-dash line in that scene appears to lie very far from Asia.A scene in “Barbie” with a map depicting contested territory in the South China Sea. The image may have prompted the Vietnamese government to ban the upcoming film.Warner Bros. PicturesIf that is, indeed, the offending map, “I really can’t see what the fuss is about,” said Bill Hayton, the author of books on Vietnam and the South China Sea.“The map in the film appears to bear no relation to a real map of the world,” Mr. Hayton added. “This looks like Vietnam’s censors trying to demonstrate their patriotism and usefulness to the regime.”Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did Warner Bros. The American movie studio told the Reuters news agency on Thursday that the “Barbie” map of the South China Sea was a “childlike” drawing with no intended significance.Why is the South China Sea important to Vietnam?Vietnam and China are neighbors with an extraordinarily complex relationship. On one hand, both are ruled by a Communist Party, making them ideological allies. They’re also busy trading partners that share an 800-mile border.Yet China occupied Vietnam for a millennium and invaded it as recently as 1979. And under Xi Jinping, China’s powerful leader, Beijing has built military outposts on contested islands in the South China Sea. It also rejected an international tribunal’s landmark 2016 ruling that sided with the Philippines by saying that China’s expansive claim to sovereignty over the sea had no legal basis. More

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    Millions Danced Joyfully to Her Song. She Drew on Her Pain to Write It.

    Nomcebo Zikode, the South African singer of the pandemic hit “Jerusalema” that inspired a global dance challenge, wrote the chorus while battling her own depression.It starts with a clap, and then the feet tap along to the beat: four times on each side, followed by a quick jump. As the melody rises, dancers dip low and twirl.It’s a dance easy enough for anyone to learn, and people all around the world have done so, with everyone from an urban dance crew in Angola to Franciscan nuns in Europe showing off their moves on social media.The “Jerusalema” dance, named for the South African hit song that inspired it, provided a moment of global joy during the lockdowns of the pandemic, a welcome distraction from the isolation and collective grief.But it was the chorus, a lamentation over a heavy bass beat, that was balm to millions. Sung in a low alto in isiZulu, one of the official languages of South Africa, audiences didn’t need to understand the song to be moved by it.The singer Nomcebo Nkwanyana, who goes by Nomcebo Zikode professionally, drew on her own intense pain when she wrote it.“Jerusalem is my home,” she sang. “Guard me. Walk with me. Do not leave me here.”After more than decade as an overlooked backing vocalist, and with her faith in music faltering, Ms. Zikode, 37, was in a dark place in 2019 when she wrote those words.Her manager, who is also her husband, insisted she write the lyrics to help her crowd out the voices in her head that were telling her to give up on music, and herself.Ms. Zikode, 37, was in a dark place when she wrote lyrics that would uplift millions.Alexia Webster for The New York Times“As if there’s a voice that says you must kill yourself,” she said, describing her depression at the time. “I remember talking to myself saying, ‘no, I can’t kill myself. I’ve got my kids to raise. I can’t, I can’t do that.’”She didn’t listen to the recording of the song until a day after it was made. As the bass began to reverberate through her car, everything went dark, she said, and she almost lost control of the vehicle. She pulled over, tears streaming down her face.“Even if you don’t believe it, this is my story,” she said. “I heard the voice saying to me, ‘Nomcebo, this is going to be a big song all over the world.’”And that prognostication soon proved true.In February 2020, a group of dancers in Angola uploaded a video showing off their choreography to the song, and challenging others to outdo them. As lockdowns were enforced just weeks later, the song was shared around the world.The global success of “Jerusalema” has taken Ms. Zikode on tour to Europe, the Caribbean and the United States. It also led to her being featured on the song “Bayethe,” which would win the Grammy award for Best Global Music Performance earlier this year.But while “Jerusalema” has brought her global renown, she has had to fight to earn any financial reward from it and to be recognized as part of its creative force.She sued her record label, and a settlement in December called for her to receive a percentage of the song’s royalties and to be allowed to audit the books of the label, Open Mic Productions, that owns the song.At least as important, the agreement also states that Ms. Zikode must be cited as the song’s “primary artist” alongside Kgaogelo Moagi, more commonly known as Master KG, the producer behind the instrumental track on “Jerusalema.”But even this victory in South Africa’s male-dominated music industry comes with significant caveats: For one, Master KG is receiving a higher percentage of royalties. And Ms. Zikode said she has yet to see payment. “I’m still waiting for my money,” she said.Open Mic did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but in a statement put out after her Grammy win, the label said: “She is a very talented artist and we welcome this agreement as a progressive resolution.”The global success of “Jerusalema” has taken Ms. Zikode on tour to Europe, the Caribbean and the United States.Alexia Webster for The New York TimesStruggles with money are nothing new to her.The youngest of four children born in a polygamous marriage, Ms. Zikode’s father died when she was young and her mother, the third wife, was left destitute. Desperate, her mother let a church outside Hammarsdale, a small town in South Africa’s eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, take her daughter in for four years.There, she slept on bunk beds among rows of other children. She sewed her own clothes and helped to clean the dormitories. The church choir was a solace, but she sorely missed home until she was able to return in the 10th grade.Her mother sold maize or bartered what vegetables she could grow for secondhand clothes. The neighbors who would ask the young Ms. Zikode to sing for them would feed her and take her in for a few nights as her mother struggled.When she was old enough, Ms. Zikode learned to braid other people’s hair to earn some money, but remembers self-consciously pressing her elbows to her side, for fear that her customers would smell that she could not afford deodorant.But what she really wanted was to sing, and she got her break at an open-call audition. She spent years singing backup for gospel stars, sharing crowded apartments with other backing vocalists. When gigs dried up, she took computer classes as a career backup plan.Ms Zikode’s first major South African hit came in 2017 when she sang vocals on the song “Emazulwini” for a well-known house music producer and D.J., Frederick Ganyani Tshabalala. But what had seemed like a long-awaited break turned into a letdown when DJ Ganyani, as he is known, did all he could, she said, to prevent her from performing the song live on her own.“They try by all means to suppress the singers,” Ms. Zikode said of the D.J.s and producers who hold most of the power in South Africa’s music industry.DJ Ganyani did not respond to requests for comment.Hoping a record label would better protect her rights, Ms. Zikode signed with Open Mic, but once the deal was inked, the label went quiet, she said, and she was left hustling to record her debut album.Feeling abandoned by the record company, her husband and manager, Selwyn Fraser, sent messages to other artists, masquerading as his wife on Instagram and Twitter, trying to get bigger names to work with her.This outreach campaign connected Ms. Zikode with Master KG and resulted in “Jerusalema.”It’s not only the song that has made her a household name in South Africa, but also her very public fight for her royalties and recognition, in the courts and on social media, said Kgopolo Mphela, a South African entertainment commentator.“She’s coming across as the hero, or the underdog, taking on Goliath,” Mr. Mphela said.For all her struggles with reaping the monetary benefits of “Jerusalema,” Ms. Zikode’s musical career has made her financially comfortable and she now has a music publishing deal with a division of Sony Music.Her 17-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son want for nothing, she said. She and her husband renovated their home, adding an in-house studio.Ms. Zikode can also bask in the accolades that have come with her Grammy win for “Bayethe.”Ms. Zikode won a Grammy for “Bayethe,” which she performed with two other South Africans, the flutist Wouter Kellerman and the performer-producer Zakes Bantwini.Alexia Webster for The New York TimesOn a chilly April night in Johannesburg, in the Grammy’s afterglow, Ms. Zikode stepped out of a borrowed Bentley at an event to celebrate South Africans who have achieved international success.As she walked the red carpet, determined to own the moment, she granted every interview request, whether from the national broadcaster or a TikTok influencer. Later that night, she accepted two checks, one for herself and one for a charity she founded that helps impoverished young women.When she took the stage to perform the song that made her famous, she hiked up her gown to dance the “Jerusalema.” More

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    At Glamorous French Festivals, Poverty Is Only Onstage

    The opening productions of the Avignon and Aix-en-Provence Festivals brought tales of the down-and-out to well-heeled spectators. It got awkward.Two events tower over France’s summer festival season each July, held in cities less than 50 miles apart. One, the Avignon Festival, is a bustling, overcrowded celebration of theater; the other, the Aix-en-Provence Festival, offers a more genteel operatic lineup.This week, well-heeled audiences sat down to opening productions at both festivals. Aix, in lieu of opera singers, unusually welcomed actors from the Comédie-Française, France’s most storied theater troupe, for “The Threepenny Opera,” directed by Thomas Ostermeier; in Avignon, the theater collective In Vitro was supplemented with some new faces for Julie Deliquet’s “Welfare.”Both productions touched on a subject that was an awkward fit for those affluent crowds: poverty.Since France has seen the cost of living rise quickly over the past year, it might have felt like an appropriate nod to the times. Yet few things are trickier onstage than asking actors — a profession in which the working class is hardly well-represented — to act “poor.”In the event, the Comédie-Française fares better than Deliquet’s actors, if only because Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 “The Threepenny Opera” is a riotous satire. Its amoral criminals and beggars are over-the-top inventions, and Ostermeier’s visually subdued production derives most of its pleasures from letting the cast’s superb talents loose.“Welfare” is another matter. It is a close adaptation of a searing 1975 documentary by Frederick Wiseman, who brought his cameras to a New York welfare center and bore witness as claimants dealt desperately with a rigid system. Wiseman himself long wanted to see the material translated onto the stage, and brought the idea to Deliquet, the director of the Théâtre Gérard-Philipe in Saint-Denis, France.Yet “Welfare,” which shared the opening honors in Avignon with a dance production, Bintou Dembélé’s “G.R.O.O.V.E.,” looks as absurd onstage as it is affecting on-screen. No one involved seems to have realized the insurmountable issue: Re-enacting the hardships of real people with performers turns those people into characters, so their stories lose the ring of truth. Fostering the same empathy takes more work, but here, Deliquet seems hesitant to step in.It doesn’t help that the unaffected black-and-white cinematography of Wiseman’s film has been replaced here with a technicolor recreation of a school gymnasium, including a bright teal floor that stretches across the vast outdoor stage of the Cour d’Honneur, Avignon’s most imposing performance venue. It’s as if the sitcom “That 70s Show” had opted to tackle welfare benefits, complete with well-cut, visibly new costumes. (Nothing says “my children are about to starve” like a neatly placed red beret.)The stories told in Wiseman’s film are loosely reorganized here into a day in the life of a welfare center, as case workers deal with one exasperated claimant after the next. One man lost his home in a fire. A couple of recovering addicts are trying to get their lives back on track. A heavily pregnant woman is asked for medical proof of her condition, while the husband of an older lady is withholding her checks.There are comedic moments in the film, but in Deliquet’s stage version, they start to feel involuntarily farcical. The energetic delivery of the cast may be because they need to project in the cavernous space, which holds around 2,000 spectators. The actors playing the claimants use their moments in the spotlight to play up the injustice of the system, instead of simply exemplifying it, as Wiseman’s subjects did so effectively.“Welfare” means well, and it’s easy to see why the new director of the Avignon Festival, Tiago Rodrigues, opted to put the project in a prestigious spot. It acts as a statement of change after the lumbering tenure of his predecessor, Olivier Py, and Deliquet is only the second woman director to receive a Cour d’Honneur slot in the 76-year history of the Avignon Festival.Deliquet deserves it: She is one of France’s top theater-makers, with a string of successes to her name. In “Welfare,” however, she is too respectful of Wiseman’s source material. Some directors, like Alexander Zeldin with his “Inequalities” trilogy, have found the right tone in recent years to tackle underprivileged lives, but “Welfare” looks as if it is playing at poverty.Christian Hecq and Véronique Vella in Thomas Ostermeier’s “The Threepenny Opera,” at the Aix-en-Provence Festival.Jean-Louis FernandezIn Aix, “The Threepenny Opera” may not be an unqualified triumph for Ostermeier, its German director, but at least the show’s roll-call of lowlife misfits is luxuriously cast, and with help from Alexandre Pateau’s sharp new French translation, comes across as it was presumably intended: wry, charismatic, brilliantly individual.Christian Hecq and Véronique Vella are exuberantly, wackily brilliant as the shallow Mr. and Mrs. Peachum, who set out to take down the notorious criminal Macheath for eloping with their daughter Polly. Not all the actors are equally fine singers, so Vella’s powerful voice is an asset here. So are the vocal talents of Marie Oppert, a recent recruit to the Comédie-Française troupe and a trained singer who, in the role of Polly, turned “Pirate Jenny” into a showstopping number.Well-crafted scenes come thick and fast in the first half, but the energy tails off later. It’s as if Ostermeier, directing for the first time in an operatic context, stopped short of going truly big. The set designs are minimalistic: four mics downstage, a black platform behind the actors and a few screens above it that show repetitive Russian constructivism-inspired collages. On the main stage of the Comédie-Française in Paris, where the production will transfer in the fall, the company could simply repurpose the very similar set of Ivo van Hove’s 2022 “Tartuffe.”Maxime Pascal conducts his own ensemble, Le Balcon, who play off the actors well: At one point, a musician even caught a mic Benjamin Lavernhe — a whimsical highlight as the corrupt policeman Tiger Brown — had inadvertently dropped into the pit. Pascal’s reorchestration, adding electronic instruments, lent an intriguing edge to the biting momentum of Weill’s score.As in Avignon, the production was staged on an open-air stage of historical significance, in the courtyard of the Palais de l’Archevêché, where the festival was born in 1948. While it is reasonably sized compared to the Cour d’Honneur, it’s a prestigious venue, where audience members pay up to $180 for the privilege of seeing “The Threepenny Opera.”As with “Welfare,” there is whiplash in watching impoverished characters in such rarefied company. But that’s the reality of prestige theater today. More